> Nope, can't say that I have. Care to elaborate?
The Laffer (named after the economist Arthur Laffer) curve is a plot
of tax revenue versus tax rates. If your tax rates are 0%, your
revenues will of course be 0 too. If your tax rates are 100%, people
won't work (why bother if you keep it all in the end anyway ?), so
your revenues will be 0 too. Somewhere in between you'll have some
revenues (hopefully), so in the simplest case the Laffer curve looks
like this (as I trust not all recipients of this message run Display
Postscript, I'll have to use ASCII....).
Tax ^
Revenue|
| ______
| / \___
| / \_
| / \__
| / \__
| / \___
| / \___
|/ \_____
+---------+---------+---------+---------+
0% 25% 50% 75% 100%
Tax rates
So in some regions you actually can _increase_ tax revenue by
lowering taxes. This is what prevents (wise) governments from jacking
up the tax rates indefinitely.
Carl Edman